{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"The Sophia Lectures with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 2: Symmetry and Asymmetry","description":"In his second Sophia Lecture, Dr Iain McGilchrist gives a bracing, counterintuitive account of the fundamental categories of our experience of the world. McGilchrist shows how fundamental binaries\u2014such as stasis and motion, simplicity and complexity, order and randomness, and even straight lines and curves\u2014do not occur in nature in ways that conform to our assumptions about an inert, independent, and predictable universe. Drawing from disciplines as disparate as physics, mathematics, biology and art, McGilchrist shows that asymmetry is not simply a principle of vitality, harmony, and beauty. McGilchrist argues that asymmetry is primary, a reality that is prior to symmetry and which forms the basis of the very symmetries in nature and the arts to which it gives rise. The dynamism which results from the drive to balance and to resist balance is at the root of the vigor of natural systems, the beauty that they embody, and which the arts then reflect. With examples ranging from the elegance of the golden ratio to the structure of the human brain, McGilchrist\u2019s lecture offers a fresh perspective on the nature of patterns in complex systems and human creations. His work invites us to search for wholeness, harmony, and connection from a set of starting points which are as surprising as they are fruitful; as always, he challenges us to see our world in new\u2014and newly unified\u2014ways. Authors and Works Mentioned in this Episode: Johann Sebastian Bach John Donne - \u201cHoly Sonnet 7: At the round earth\u2019s imagin\u2019d corners\u201d Gerard Manley Hopkins - \u201cCarrion Comfort\u201d Werner Heisenberg - Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations with Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Bohr, and Other Physicists of Our Time Alexander Pope - \u201cThe Rape of the Lock\u201d Iain McGilchrist - The Master and his Emissary Pierre Curie Chien-Shiung Wu Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Aesop Heraclitus Democritus Leonardo da Vinci Louis Pasteur Rong Li & Bruce Bowerman - \u201cSymmetry breaking in biology\u201d Arthur Koestler Aristotle Oliver Sacks Thomas Holstein Tim Crow Onur G\u00fcnt\u00fcrk\u00fcn Jane Clark & Daniel Simons (Christopher Chabris) - Gorillas in Our Midst Jonathan Rowson Alastair McIntosh Richard Dawkins Nikolaj Nikolaenko Luciano Laurana Giorgio Martini - Ideal City Raphael - The School of Athens Andrea Palladio William Blake - \u201cThe Tyger\u201d Theodosius II Christ Pantocrator Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel John P. McGovern William Osler William Alwyn Lishman William Shakespeare - King Lear John Cleese Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Sir Roger Scruton ","author_name":"The Ralston College Podcast","author_url":"https:\/\/www.ralston.ac\/conversations","html":"